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Back Respected Sir Save as PDF
Chapters (47)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Acknowledgment
  6. Translator’s Introduction
  7. ONE
  8. TWO
  9. THREE
  10. FOUR
  11. FIVE
  12. SIX
  13. SEVEN
  14. EIGHT
  15. NINE
  16. TEN
  17. ELEVEN
  18. TWELVE
  19. THIRTEEN
  20. FOURTEEN
  21. FIFTEEN
  22. SIXTEEN
  23. SEVENTEEN
  24. EIGHTEEN
  25. NINETEEN
  26. TWENTY
  27. TWENTY-ONE
  28. TWENTY-TWO
  29. TWENTY-THREE
  30. TWENTY-FOUR
  31. TWENTY-FIVE
  32. TWENTY-SIX
  33. TWENTY-SEVEN
  34. TWENTY-EIGHT
  35. TWENTY-NINE
  36. THIRTY
  37. THIRTY-ONE
  38. THIRTY-TWO
  39. THIRTY-THREE
  40. THIRTY-FOUR
  41. THIRTY-FIVE
  42. THIRTY-SIX
  43. THIRTY-SEVEN
  44. THIRTY-EIGHT
  45. About the Author
  46. Other Titles
  47. What’s next onyour reading list?

A sociopolitical view of man’s existence is at the very root of almost everything that Mahfouz has written. Even in a novel with a strong metaphysical purport like al-Tariq (The Way), the social message is aptly woven into the texture of the work: man is not meant to spend his life on earth in a futile search for an apparently apathetic God and his only true hope of salvation is in the exertion of a positive and responsible effort to better his lot and that of others. That Mahfouz has always been a socially committed writer with a deep concern for the problem of social injustice is an incontestable fact. To him individual morality is inseparable from social morality. In other words, according to Mahfouz’s moral code, those who only seek their own individual salvation are damned; to him nirvana is, as it were, a distinctly collective state. On the other hand, characters who are saved in Mahfouz’s world are only those with altruistic motives, those who show concern for others and demonstrate a kind of awareness of their particular predicament being part of a more general one.

The picture of the world as it emerges from the bulk of Mahfouz’s work is very gloomy indeed, though not completely despondent. It shows that the author’s social Utopia is far from being realized in his country and in the world at large. What further augments the bleakness of the human condition in Mahfouz’s worldview is the fact that in addition to social oppression and the individual’s moral frailty, man’s toil is also thwarted by an even more destructive power: time. Mahfouz seems to conceive of time as a metaphysical force of oppression. His novels have consistently shown time as the bringer of change, and change as a very painful process, and very often time is not content until it has dealt his heroes the final blow of death. To sum up, in Mahfouz’s dark tapestry of the world there are only two bright spots. These consist of man’s continuing struggle for equality on the one hand and the promise of scientific progress on the other (deliverance from above is out), but meanwhile, life is a tragedy. It is interesting to listen to what the novelist himself has to say on the subject: